Enhancing Routing Protocol with Memory in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

As wireless networks are widely deployed and become prevalent, TCP performance over mobile ad hoc networks attracts more attention. The earlier studies on TCP in wireless networks have shown that it performs poorly in ad hoc networks. They tackled the problem by modifying TCP itself or MAC protocols. In this paper, we present a novel routing protocol that enhances the end-to-end TCP performance. According to the investigation of link failure based on the route history, our proposed algorithm named Routing Protocol With Memory (RPM) avoids generating unnecessary route discovery messages, which are stemmed from the hidden/exposed terminal problem and degrade TCP performance very much due to the retransmission timeout. We focus on the popular protocols of dynamic source routing (DSR) and ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV), and enhance them by putting the simple capability of route memory at each terminal. Extensive simulation results under various environments confirm the advantage of our proposal over DSR and AODV.